You may reach a point in your life where you look around yourself and wonder: When did the bomb drop? You are feeling survivor emotions, thinking victim thoughts, haunted by the specter of an anonymous trauma. You look through the hum at those close to you, your brother, your lover, your children, and you can see traces of the same fallout settling in every crack of their unspoken thoughts. You watch it spread like a black cloud across the hidden rubble of our most private frames of mind. In your quietest moments you puzzle over what happened, and when it happened, and whether or not something actually happened. But the unshakeable sense of loss and apprehension, a built-in catalog of crises, lingers for no apparent reason and begins to inform your sense of what it means to be human. We often link this fallout to a broken relationship, an experience of abuse, or any number of the awful eventualities that we use to define ourselves and name the emotional wavelengths that seem to have no other source. But over time you may become convinced that this mythopoetic apocalypse is simply the default condition of life.
Alejandro Adams’ Around the Bay is hardwired into this sense of trauma. Not simply in terms of its storyline, which in a detailed way tracks the life of a single father, his unmanageable son, and estranged daughter, but in the very fabric of its rhythmic edits. I once heard Claire Denis say that her L’intrus is “not realistic, but it is real in its feelings” and that “it is a proposal.” That little key unlocked a lot of her films for me (especially Vendredi soir, which in this respect is a high point of her career). I wouldn’t say that Around the Bay shares in this same kind of structural provision that elicits a fairly Barthesian brand of reader-response. But it is caught in a similar web of representational issues that compels Denis to produce films with a relative opacity, a compassionate disregard for an audience steeped in what are ultimately less rewarding narrative patterns. There are ways in which the storyline of Around the Bay could have been told in more immediately engaging ways, as it pretty much has been in a myriad other films and sitcoms (distant father, lost daughter, unmanageable son, yada yada yada). But these evaporate quickly, don’t they? We see these kinds of characters so often that at some point we simply stop seeing them. Adams’ solution to this problem, a sort of auteur compassion for those he discovers in his storylines, involves consciously abandoning traditional directorial processes for the chance that he may be able to snag a bit of pure cinema from a stream of unadorned DV. And he does.
The distant father becomes a formal device, imparting his numb disassociation from everything to the slippage between image and audio. The fragile stoicism of the daughter takes its shape over long stretches of shoe-string verité vignettes until collapsing in the final moments – the film’s first truly coherent image – which bears the burden of all these loose threads. The young boy, who seems a bit tangential to the whole affair, really is at the center of the film’s chaos. He is an incarnation of Adams’s sense of wonder in some scenes, and charts the meandering vigor of his directorial process in others.
Adams’ films are filled with the Bressonian tedium of life. They become overdetermined. Too long. Too many of these tenuous sequences. A man reading the paper. A dead fly. A peanut butter sandwich. Back to the paper. He is rubbing his chin. Then taking a shower. A little boy climbing a tree. But despite the difficulty of maintaining this grueling pace, the minutiae accumulates and begins to look like something, almost like a story. It is interminable, but there is definitely something in there. And then the film edits over to his daughter talking to a co-worker about how her estranged father has just lost his job and his girlfriend left him, and it all snaps into place. This rubber-banding effect persists throughout the film, cycling the audience through montages that only gain traction later. All the formal dislocation, which is precisely that felt by its characters, gains greater clarity as the soundtrack begins to slip later in the film. Conversations slide across fades to black and unexpected edits. Background noise eclipses conversations previously begun. An ocean of crickets invades the spaces in which we would expect to find declarations, impassioned explanations, or even less poignant bobs of narrative info.
Around the Bay has some sharp representational axes to grind. But Adams is deft enough – via a Leigh dramaturgical luckiness, a Dogme aloofness, a quietly uncollected Cassevetes determination, he is a name-dropping choose your own adventure – that any meta-critique of cinema as a Platonic arbiter of otherwise genuine flickers of those seemingly untappable gestures of broken humanity becomes a means rather than an end. He could pose himself as provocateur, but submits himself to the gentle development of his script instead. This is fine, indulgent cinema. It isn’t refined at all. But it appeals to the tectonic flux of narrative that engages our personal editing processes. Loss and forgiveness proceed along these leaps and cuts in which our personal scripts bleed together despite our desire for them to cleave neatly. I was shaken by the final strokes of Around the Bay, which isn’t merely a formal exercise, but a memorable description of this broken family.